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Strike Rouge

Spolier alert! In another brave attempt to squeeze every last penny of fanboys, Gundam Seed introduced another variation of Strike during the final episodes – the Strike Rouge, piloted by Kagari. The concept was a bit abhorrent at first, since Strike is a pretty masculine design, and yet spraying it with a pink/red motif to make it more female. Also I’m not sure if Kagari the tomboy will approve of such a girlie coloration (ok so all Orb mechs has this red thing going… fine). But then the name sounds pretty cool and being a fan of Kagari, I felt into Bandai’s trap, right when they have Kagari and Athrun embrace in front of Strike Rouge’s head, before the sortie. It just looked very cool from that angle. And then we had it doing the very touching Athrun rescue at the end…

The MG Strike Rouge features the Aile striker equipment. As cool as it is, I wish they’d either go with the IWSP set, or even have B-Club release a resin set. Building two of these aile packs (the other for the normal Strike) aren’t that much fun. Fortunately, I really love the aile pack – very unique design, much better than the very pedestrian Force Impulse variant.

Kit Review

The MG Strike & Strike Rouge are very well done kits, featuring a very “genki” look with a very lean and sportive look. The only thing I’m not completely happy about is the lack of waist movement; the *HG* Astray Red can do it, and yet they cheaped out here. Of course I could’ve do the conversion myself, but then why not spend the time on the PG Strike which can do a better job of that.

Building

I really don’t like the pink base color of the Strike Rouge. Not only is it very dirty looking for a mech, it also reduces the contrast of the mech, making it look a little boring. So I decided to give it the VF-19 valkyrie’s radome + white as the base color. It resembles this flesh color which has enough red to blend in with the chest’s red color, and yet enough yellow to contrast it a bit. I think it worked out pretty well; the down side is that the white decals no longer do anything on this base color. Ah well. The launching base is a great idea, many cool poses can be gotten from that.